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Michael’s accident occurred May 28 as he poured citronella-scented gel into a previously lit candle before a wedding celebration at the Riverhead home of his aunt, Fran Reyer-Johnson. The bottle of FireGel brand fuel exploded in his hand, covering his body with the burning jelly. He suffered third-degree burns over 40 percent of his body. His mother, Nancy Reyer, was also injured while trying to extinguish the flames.
As of Tuesday, Michael was still in a medically induced coma, Ms. Reyer-Johnson said. His heart had stopped beating Thursday night, though his pulse was brought back through a defibrillator. Doctors say his condition has been improving slightly and he is now stable.
Several days after Michael’s accident, 24-year-old Nick Stone, a recent graduate of University of Colorado in Boulder, suffered second- and third- degree burns over 40 percent of his body in an almost identical mishap in Manhattan, according to his stepfather, John LaViolette. Mr. Stone has been at New York Presbyterian Hospital since.
On May 21, Rachael Smilowitz suffered second- and third degree burns in a gel candle accident in South Carolina, according to an NBC news affiliate in Charleston.
The accidents all involved FireGel brand citronella gel, a jellylike substance that is poured into ceramic fire pots, that was purchased at Bed Bath & Beyond.
And according to records, there have been more accidents in recent years.
A 42-year-old woman suffered second-degree burns on Aug. 23, 2010, and a man suffered burns on his legs on June 24, 2010, in almost identical accidents, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. Ten additional incidents in which people suffered first-, second- and third-degree burns from gel candles have been reported to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in the past three years, according to records.
When Napa Home & Garden Inc., which manufactures the firepots and packages the fuel, was told of the accidents by The New York Times, it asked Bed Bath & Beyond on Friday to pull both products from store shelves until it could add new warning labels to them. A spokeswoman for Bed Bath & Beyond confirmed that stores nationwide were told to stop selling the products Friday afternoon, the Times reported.
The warning label on the products reads: “Use Flame Snuffer included with each [candle] to extinguish flame. Exercise the same precautions as you would with any other open fire. Do not add fuel when lit and never pour fuel on an open flame or hot surface. Never touch unit during or after burning gel fuel. [Candle] may be extremely HOT,” according to the Napa release.
The gel candles could not be found on the shelves of the Riverhead Bed Bath & Beyond store Tuesday afternoon.
But according to the Good Morning America report on Monday, the fuel and firepots could still be found at Bed Bath & Beyond stores in Maryland.
Bed Bath & Beyond representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
Although Michael and his family have suffered an especially painful few weeks, they hope the accident and the attention it has received will prevent others from suffering a similar fate.
One of the things I've been fascinated by since the Internet went commercial in 1995 has been it's impact on startups.
At one time a fledgling business would have had a long, slow haul to gain distribution and visibility outside of its immediate locality but the 'Net has changed everything.
Now it's possible for a couple of guys to reach further and faster with less backing and develop a niche business that has real potential ... which brings me to a company I just discovered that epitomizes what I'm talking about.
The company is Broquet (pronounced "bro-kay" to rhyme with "bouquet") and it's singular mission ... to make giving a guy a gift for the likes of Valentine's Day (or any other wussy occasion) something he'll actually give a **** about.
Yes, on Valentines Day there's no end of fripperies that guys can find to bestow upon the object of their desires; candy, flowers, candle-lit dinners, champagne ... the list is endless and progressively more spendy.
The same cannot be said for the significant other looking to gift the dude in their life. Nope, the options for Valentine's Day for your man are slim to none because, let's face it, how many guys want a bunch of flowers or candy? Yep, hardly any.
So, what does the significant other of a guy give to show that they care? The answer, according to Broquet, is a "Broquet", an excessively manly version of the bouquet.
As the company notes "Flowers and chocolate? Try bacon and bacon."
Broquets don't come wrapped in sissy cellophane or wussy paper ... oh no, they come in a galvanized steel bucket wrapped in recycled, used fish netting from darkest Louisiana with the contents nestled (aggressively) in wood shavings and paper scraps.
The contents of Broquets are all "tested" by team members but they request that guys "Tell us what you want to see as well, because we can only do so much barbecuing and beard-growing."
The chaps behind Broquet have only been open for business since November but, thanks to the 'Net, their clever idea becomes visible not just to their area or their state but to the entirety of the world and the only limitations to their business are how much and how effectively they can promote their products and whether they can ship to wherever the clients might be (I'm guessing there won't be too many Kyrgyzstanis getting Broquets in time for Valentine's Day).
So, if you're looking for the perfect gift for the beard-growing, wood-chopping, red meat-eating, guy in your life, look no further ... little does he know there may well be a Broquet full of bacon or something equally manly in his future.
Old Capitol Farmers Market, 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Adams Street from Second to Fifth streets.
Old Capitol Blues and BBQs, noon to midnight, downtown Springfield; $5. Main stage entertainers: Eddie Shaw and the Wolfgang; Sue Foley and Peter Karp; Nick Curran and the Lowlifes; Treble Clef Palette.
“The Curious Case of Abraham Lincoln: His Burial in Oak Ridge Cemetery,” 2 p.m.; meet Mary Todd Lincoln’s sister, Elizabeth Edwards, 3 and 3:30 p.m. Both in Lincoln Home Visitor Center. Free.
“Dividing the Estate,” 8 p.m., Theatre in the Park, Lincoln’s New Salem State Historic Site near Petersburg; $12 adults, $10 seniors, $7 children.
Special needs today: A- and O-Negative, A-Positive.
Tag Archive \| "manuel rueda"
St Joseph’s Church is attended mostly by Hispanic immigrants. Since 1971, members of this parish take to the streets of Tremont during Good Friday to re-enact the passion of Christ. The 14 stations of the cross are carefully replicated by community members dressed in biblical garb, as a pre-recorded voice leads prayers from a loudspeaker and describes the challenges faced by Jesus on his way to crucifixion.
Rafael Gonzalez played the son of God this holy week, dragging a massive wooden cross around the neighborhood, for the sixth consecutive year. Gonzalez is proud to serve in his community, but he is aging and this could be his last year in this role.
Sidney Flores patrols the streets of Tremont relentlessly. He paints apartments to make a living. But in his spare time, he looks out for potholes, broken street signs and other problems in sidewalks and streets. Flores is a self appointed guardian of the Bronx. And the Ink went on his quality of life patrol.
During the winter, Greg Rose began to find empty bottles of wine and Thunderbird in a small alley that runs between his home in Highbridge and his neighbor´s house. Rose believes men living in the local homeless shelter are drinking here at night. He also says one of the shelter residents offered to sell him drugs.
“It´s unsettling, because it makes me believe that when I sleep at night something is going on in my little alleyway” he says.
Many Highbridge residents say some of the homeless men living in the Stadium Motor Lodge Transitional Home –a shelter on Sedgewick Avenue- are also urinating on the streets, drinking in public and occasionally sleeping on people´s door steps when they fail to make the shelter´s 10 p.m. curfew.
The un-neighborly conduct of some shelter residents has increased security concerns in the area. It has also generated tensions between local activists who want the homeless men to be transferred away from the neighborhood and shelter operators who claim they are doing their best to to serve the homeless population and to respond to security concerns.
So far more than 1,000 Highbridge residents have signed a petition in which they ask local authorities to transfer the homeless men away from the neighborhood. The city however has not responded to their pleas. The Deparment of Homeless Services (DHS) says it has a mandate to help the homeless men out of their situation and to house them at their current location.
The Bronx Ink has not been able to verify reports from residents that men living at the Stadium Lodge are urinating, drinking or sleeping on the streets of this poor but quiet neighborhood.
On a brief tour of Highbridge however, community activist Agnes Johnson was quick to point out a spot just one block from the shelter, where the homeless men allegedly drink and hide their booze.
“One time we found a knife here,” she added, pointing to a small gap between two fences that separate Sedgewick Avenue from a future construction site. Crushed beer cans and a Beefeater gin bottle filled up the two-foot gap between both fences.
Nancy Mendez, a cashier at the Highbridge Pharmacy on Ogden Avenue says that mentally unstable men have repeatedly attempted to steal over-the-counter medicines and other small items from her store.
In February, Mendez said a woman who was with one of these men punched her in the face, after she attempted to recover a packet of Tylenol that the couple had taken from the pharmacy. A few days after the incident, Mendez found out that the man lived in the shelter.
Concerns over the Stadium Motor Lodge began last September, when the department of Homeless Services ordered the shelter´s operator, Promesa Basic Housing, to transfer its previous residents to another shelter.
Dozens of single mothers and their children left and were replaced by a group of some 200 single males that includes former convicts, men with substance abuse problems and a handful of men convicted for sexual crimes.
In January, Barbara Brancaccio the deputy commissioner of the Department of Homeless Service told the Daily News it transferred the men to the Stadium Motor lodge because currently there is a greater need for housing for single adults.
A DHS spokesperson also told the Bronx Ink that residents at the shelter receive psychological counseling, job straining and medical attention.
But while Highbridge residents acknowledge that the homeless need help, but they say nobody warned them about their new neighbors and their possible impact on the community.
As activist Agnes Johnson walks around the streets of Highbridge, greeting locals and mentioning the homeless shelter, it is common for her to find people who do not even know that the women were replaced by single men last fall.
Johnson is concerned that the shelter´s new residents will only bring problems to a neighborhood that is already besieged by high poverty rates and crime. The shelter is just a five minute walk away from elementary school PS 126, where Johnson teaches free ballet classes on Saturdays.
Johnson fears the few public spaces that are available to children outside the school – a small park and two basketball courts – could be jeopardized by the presence of aggressive or drunken men. “What good does this shelter do for the community?” she said.
In response to these concerns, a DHS spokesperson speaking on background, said that on February 11th agency members had met with the offices of Council Member Helen Foster, State Senator Jose Serrano and other local politicians to discuss ways to prevent loitering.
Pam Mattel – Promesa Basic’s chief operations officer – says the Stadium Motor Lodge has a 24-hour security team surveying the shelter’s perimeters and a shuttle to take residents to local bus and subway stations.
Mattel says that in January the shelter also created a Community Advisory Board that meets monthly with representatives of local government and community organizations like church groups and members of community board 4.
She warns against blaming shelter residents for problems that could be caused by other people entering the neighborhood.
But some activists feel excluded from Mattel’s advisory board and say it does not truly represent the community´s desires.
Greg Rose believes community members should monitor the behaviors of some of the men living in the shelter. Keeping records of any unsolicited behavior that can be shown to shelter operators and local authorities. “If we don’t document anything we just sound like disgruntled residents” he said.
Meanwhile, he and other residents continue to fear the presence –and the alleged behavior- of some members of the Stadium Motor Lodge in Highbridge.
Rose walks out to meet his friends at their cars when they come to visit him at home. In the past few months even his mother, who has lived in Highbridge for 50 years, has begun to stack up chairs against her front door at night, hoping that will keep her safe from potential assailants.
Bronx residents call 311 to complain more about plumbing and heating issues than anything else, according to an analysis of the latest numbers released by the city last week.
For the first time since 2003 when the city launched the 311 hotline, New Yorkers can pinpoint what 311 callers are complaining about—by borough, zip code, community board, even buildings and streets—on a colorful interactive, online map.
Until recently, the city just used tables to show what type of complaints New Yorkers made and where the 60,000 daily calls originated.
Through a brief analysis of the City’s 311 Online Request Map, we found that Bronx residents frequently called 311 over the last three months to report housing problems, such as bad plumbing or lack of heat. But during the same period, Bronxites filed few complaints about environmental problems like air quality.
Residents of Community District 7, an area that includes Norwood and Kingsbridge Heights, made the most calls of any other district in the borough with 3,946 complaints filed over the past three months. According to the map, 839 of these calls related to heating, while more than 1,000 had to do with plumbing issues, such as leaks.
In other low-income areas of the Bronx, complaints related to tenants’ rights numbered in the hundreds, but were significantly lower than those made in Community District 7.
complaints, while Community District 2 which includes Huntspoint and Longwood, only made 221 heating requests.
Greg Faulkner, a former chairman of Community District Board 7, and currently the chief of staff for City Councilman Fernando Cabrera, says the high numbers of housing complaints in his district reflect a struggle between low income tenants living in buildings with housing problems and landlords who are unwilling or unable to guarantee basic living conditions. But he also sees the high number of complaints in CB7 as a sign that people in this part of town are learning to call the city and elected officials.
Sergio Cuevas, a tenants’ rights organizer chuckled with satisfaction when he heard about the high number of complaints coming from the northwest Bronx.
Cuevas lives in 3018 Heath avenue, one of ten dilapidated buildings recently acquired by real estate impresario Steve Finkelstein.
He is part of a group of community organizers that encourages people in these buildings to call 311 and hands out 311 flyers to fellow tenants. For Cuevas these calls are a first step towards putting landlords on the city’s watch-list.
Cuevas claims 311 calls have helped some tenants to get housing problems fixed and sometimes calls on behalf of people, who don’t understand how to use the touchtone system.
Environmental issues on the other hand don’t seem to be as pressing an issue for Bronx 311 callers. According to the interactive map, residents of the Bronx have filed less than 50 complaints on indoor air quality since November.
Indoor air quality complaints include lack of ventilation in a building, or bad air quality due to construction, renovation or the use of chemicals.
The number of outdoor air quality complaints, including concerns over car fumes, dust from a construction site, soot or pollution, is even lower. Only one outdoor air quality complaint was registered in the entire borough over the past three months.
Miquela Craylor director of the environmental group Sustainable South Bronx, says local residents are not filing air quality complaints because they don’t understand that they have a right to fresh air. She also believes many are so frustrated with pollution and the response of local government that they don’t bother to complain.
Wearing thick cotton gloves and a leopard print hat, Myriam Aquino hands out a one-pound bag of rice. Her client pushes his small shopping cart forward and both arrive at the next shelf. “You can pick one of these or one of those” she says in Spanish pointing to a bag of raisins and picking up a pack of figs.
The Community Food Pantry at Highbridge on Ogden Avenue, currently has no heating and the selection of brands is limited. But food is free here, and for thousands of Bronx residents with low incomes or no jobs, the groceries on offer enable them to save $20 or $30 that can be spent on rising rents, transportation hikes or other non-negotiable expenditures.
Like hundreds of food pantries across New York, Highbridge is facing difficult times. The 2008 recession, and the ensuing period of jobless economic growth has increased the number of people demanding the food pantry’s services.
In 2007, Highbridge used to get 800 unique visits per month says director Nurah Amatullah. Now it averages about 1,200 a month.
But funds for running the pantry are becoming scarce and its director says she may have to shut the place down in March because there is little money to pay for staff or operational costs.
Myriam Aquino is not only a regular volunteer at the Highbridge food pantry. She is also a client.
“There are things in food poverty work that requires paid staff to do it.” Amatullah says in a subtle Trinidadian accent.
Hunger levels across the city are alarming according to the Food Bank for New York. The nonprofit estimates that 37 percent of New Yorkers resorted to emergency food aid at some point in 2010.
That number is slightly below the 40 percent figure registered in 2009. But Carlos Rodriguez, the Food Bank’s vice president for benefit access, points out that many New Yorkers are now limiting the amount of food they buy and its quality. His organization estimates that thirty percent of New Yorkers reduced their food intake last year.
Meanwhile, soup kitchens and food pantries across the city say greater numbers of people are showing up at their doors.
The New York City Coalition Against Hunger, an umbrella organization for emergency food providers, sent out a questionnaire last year to some 1,100 local soup kitchens and food pantries. More than 200 returned the questionnaire with 85 percent reporting they had fed more people in 2010 than in 2009.
Executive Director Joel Berg says New York food pantries and soup kitchens improved their response to increased demand in 2010, thanks to greater investments by the federal government in food stamps.
In New York City last year, the federal government spent more than $3.2billion in food stamps through its Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program he says, taking pressure off local food pantries and soup kitchens.
Seven out of ten agencies reporting to the Coalition Against Hunger last year, also said that they received additional funding from the federal government through the Emergency Food and Shelter Program.
But anti-hunger advocates say most of the money goes towards food and little is left for operational costs and staff.
On Webster Avenue, near the Botanical Garden, the nonprofit agency POTS, -Part of the Solution- runs a soup kitchen that serves 350 hot meals a day and a food pantry that gets approximately 40 daily visits.
The number of people attending the pantry has increased by 20 percent over the past 12 months says emergency food services director, Sister Mary Alice Annan, while at the soup kitchen Annan reckons attendance has increased by 50 percent.
Staffing which consists of 15 employees has remained the same for years, with POTS relying on a large number of volunteers to stock food and serve the clientele.
Like most who work in this industry however, Hannan says there are jobs that are best left to paid staff, such as operating databases, cooking in the soup kitchen and writing grant proposals. “Volunteers don’t always show up, so we use them to supplement what we do” she says.
Nurah Amatullah, from the Community Food Pantry at Highbridge says that while volunteers are a crucial part of her operation, she cannot rely on them to regularly receive and organize food deliveries that arrive at 8:30 am.
There is also a lack of people in the neighborhood trained to run databases that document how many attended the pantry, the number of people in their household and other data required by funders.
So while she advocates for the professional staffing of food pantries, Amatullah has had to furlough her staff of three, paying them small amounts of money as people donate cash to the food pantry through a PayPal account she set up in support of the pantry.
Amatullah’s organization -the Muslim Womens’ Institute for Research and Development- receives funds for operational costs from United Way and grants for staffing from Feeding America.
Funding from these sources has shrunk and Amatullah has not found another donor to fund pantry operations. It costs $2,500 a week to fund Highbridge and its sister pantry in Parkchester Amatullah says, with less than one third of this money going to staff.

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